Wednesday, September 23, 2015

The left is really reaching in their latest Carly Fiorina smear

Today in the Daily Beast there is an article titled "Carly Fiorina's $4 Billion Job Scam", sounds pretty ominous right? As if she is some evil con artist who stole $4 billion from someone. The actual subject of the article though is pretty innocuous, they are talking about the tax repatriation holiday that was enacted in 2004. It allowed companies to bring offshore profits back into this country at a one-time tax rate of 5.25% instead of the usual 35%. Many multinational corporations were sitting on billions of dollars that were earned offshore and not bringing them back into the US because they didn't want to lose over a third of the cash. As a result of this tax holiday, $362 billion was brought back into this country though instead of going to create jobs, much of it went to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks, dividends and acquisitions (oh the horror of shareholders getting money without the IRS getting their pound of flesh first!).

So what was Carly's role in all of this? Pretty minimal. Hewlett Packard was part of a lobbying group formed by multinational corporations and trade associations called the Homeland Investment Coalition. I can't really see any information that HP was at the forefront of this campaign or anything as I remember just about every large corporation wanted this act enacted.

Also, importantly this had strong bi-partisan support. Here is the list of Senators voting for it (it passed the Senate by a vote of 69-17):

Note that two of the Democratic Presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Lincoln Chafee both voted for this bill, as did many liberal democrats like Schumer, Mikulski and Harkin. In the House, it passed by a similar margin, 280-141 and then signed by George W. Bush.

So even if Carly and HP decided not to lobby for this legislation, it probably would have passed anyway. So how exactly is this Carly's job scam? Yes, HP profited from it and passed the money along to shareholders. Wouldn't it have been a violation of Carly's fiduciary responsibility if she didn't take advantage of tax repatriation?

The left is clearly scared of Carly and they are trying to throw everything at her to see what sticks. Note they didn't do this with Trump despite a hell of a lot more ammunition to work with. Why? Because they know he would be a general election disaster.